SSD price downtrend welcome news for PC upgraders

[HEXUS]

And NAND Flash prices will continue to drop in Q3 2018, reports IT industry journal.

Read more.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I noticed this a few months ago too:

https://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware...pping-now.html

You can get multiple 240GB/256GB SSDs for around £50 and under now:

https://www.ebuyer.com/store/Storage...rice+ascending
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/256g...-write-500mb-s
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/teamg...hd-004-tg.html

[DanceswithUnix]

That 1TB MX500 in the article is one I have been keeping a beady eye on. I have a rather old HDD in my machine which is a bit worrying, but whilst it keeps spinning I keep waiting

If the 1TB SSDs drop below the £150 mark, I have to wonder what that will do to the HDD market.

[Ttaskmaster]

If the 1TB SSDs drop below the £150 mark, I have to wonder what that will do to the HDD market.

Hopefully kill it dead and force-flood the market with affordably sub-£100 multi-TB SSDs...!!

Keeping up with The Future has kinda left me stuffed, as I have a lovely case that I cannot make proper use of, because despite having 4xSSD side-mounts I still have to keep the HDD cages in place, which blocks off the front rad mount!

[davebodger]

Integral 120GB SSDs from MyMemory.co.uk for £24.99 are a good price right now.
They are ideal for upgrading pupil PCs at the school I work at. (the PC only holds the OS and a few apps, all data is held on a central server).
Did 14 last week, more on order now. :-)
Now what do I do with this growing pile of old 160GB HDDs ?

[Rubarb]

That 1TB MX500 in the article is one I have been keeping a beady eye on. I have a rather old HDD in my machine which is a bit worrying, but whilst it keeps spinning I keep waiting

If the 1TB SSDs drop below the £150 mark, I have to wonder what that will do to the HDD market.

Probably a lot, ssd isn't exactly new tech now, and yet the inflated prices etc? sure if your after new nand tech expect to pay more but the old ssd tech isn't new and still expensive.

I call shenanigans

[DanceswithUnix]

Probably a lot, ssd isn't exactly new tech now, and yet the inflated prices etc? sure if your after new nand tech expect to pay more but the old ssd tech isn't new and still expensive.

I call shenanigans

It might not be new, but you are buying quite a lot of silicon in an SSD and there is plenty of competition in supplying flash chips, controllers and assembled SSDs. Hard disks OTOH are the new tape drive, as consumer devices they are probably only kept alive by low cost for things like games consoles and DVR boxes. If demand for hard drives were to drop and they stop being a mass produced item, then prices will rise hastening their demise.

[Ttaskmaster]

Probably a lot, ssd isn't exactly new tech now, and yet the inflated prices etc?

But neither are they mainstream - We have HDDs in all our work PCs, and many people still haven't yet discovered this magical "easy way to make your computer go faster"...
Until large old corporations like us start swapping over, and SSDs become the default for those who find specs in PC World a bit overwhelming, they will remain stupidly expensive.

[Dashers]

I've been keeping an eye on this recently, but still not quite there. I'm wanting a couple of 500GB drives to stripe, but when pondering over which one, I read a review from 2014 on Amazon where the reviewer included the price, £86.

500GB is floating around the £100 mark still at the moment. When buying multiple drives, a fifteen quid price difference is significant. I'll bide my time with my 30gb free disk space.

[Spreadie]

IMO, be wary of cheap deals on Sandisk SSDs - I've been bitten by those.

I've been running SSDs since 2009 and have had three failures in that time. All of them were Sandisk, over the last couple of years - a 120GB, a 240GB and, most recently, a 480GB.

Never again.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

IMO, be wary of cheap deals on Sandisk SSDs - I've been bitten by those.

I've been running SSDs since 2009 and have had three failures in that time. All of them were Sandisk, over the last couple of years - a 120GB, a 240GB and, most recently, a 480GB.

Never again.

Same here myself,and a few people I know.

BTW,I assume the 480GB one suddenly went kaput during boot. Out of interest how old was it?

[Spreadie]

Same here myself,and a few people I know.

BTW,I assume the 480GB one suddenly went kaput during boot. Out of interest how old was it?

It was my Steam Drive, which now resides on a much more reliable 1TB 850 EVO. Thank crunchie for backups - I don't fancy re-downloading ~350GB of games.

Couple of years old, iirc.

[ByteMyAscii]

If the 1TB SSDs drop below the £150 mark, I have to wonder what that will do to the HDD market.

Hopefully kill it dead and force-flood the market with affordably sub-£100 multi-TB SSDs...!!

Keeping up with The Future has kinda left me stuffed, as I have a lovely case that I cannot make proper use of, because despite having 4xSSD side-mounts I still have to keep the HDD cages in place, which blocks off the front rad mount!

I don't see a need for them to be killed off.
If anything the value prospect of mechanical drives has driven innovation in flash storage, and that has subsequently driven innovation in mechanical drives, something that was sorely lacking in my opinion before SSDs became a realistic consumer product.
I feel mechanical drives still have something to offer even to consumers not using them.

[Ttaskmaster]

I don't see a need for them to be killed off.

Lightly maimed, then...

I'm just itching to ditch my 1, 2 and 4TB HDDs with equivalent capacity SSDs, so I'll take whatever works best to make such things also equivalent in price, too!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Data retention seems to be better on traditional HDD technology AFAIK so might be more useful for storing stuff as a backup.

It was my Steam Drive, which now resides on a much more reliable 1TB 850 EVO. Thank crunchie for backups - I don't fancy re-downloading ~350GB of games.

Couple of years old, iirc.

I had a modded FO4 playthough,and I only had an older backup. Apparently one of the settlement mods I was using disappeared from Nexus mods,so luckily I managed to track it down,otherwise it would have broken a playthrough I was a few 100 hours into.

Most of the failures seemed to happen around 15 to 24 months for people I knew,and it would happen at boot,when the drive suddenly goes kaput.

[DanceswithUnix]

Data retention seems to be better on traditional HDD technology AFAIK so might be more useful for storing stuff as a backup.

Miniscule regions of soft magnetised rust vs an isolated domain of silicon where you are almost counting individual electrons on and off. I think they are both great adverts for regular backups tbh

In both cases you probably want to be occasionally reading the entire drive and writing back blocks that needed a lot of ECC to recover them.